Wireless mesh networks are considered as a potentially
attractive alternative to provide broadband access to users.
They have been studied extensively by the research community
since they raised a lot of new issues due to their unique
characteristics. Here, we focus on scenarios where these networks
are installed and managed to provide broadband access to a
set of fixed nodes. While a lot of research has been done on
this type of networks, there are very few insightful engineering
results that can help network operators deploy and manage such
networks. It is the objective of this paper to present some major
engineering insights on such networks. We limit our scope to
networks that are single rate and in which all nodes use the
same transmit power. In particular, we quantify the advantage of
multi-hop over single-hop. We illustrate the importance of multipath
routing over single path routing, and of optimal routing
versus min-hop routing. We revisit the notion of spatial reuse.
Finally we present results showing the importance of selecting
an appropriate interference model.